THE FLAME received a starred review in the October 15 issue of Library Journal:

"Renowned singer/songwriter Cohen (1934–2016) shares a deeply personal take on the wonders and challenges of life and love in this collection that will appeal not only to his fans but also anyone who loves beautiful lyrics that parse life's meaning. Cohen devotees, in particular, will be entranced by the many line drawings—mostly self-portraits—that extend the words in a kind of visual diary. (One caveat with the drawings—the words reproduced often appear too small for easy reading.) Cohen, who struggled to finish this work before his death, also included a dialog with a former teacher. Sometimes, the poet's language is ordinary and the line breaks arbitrary ("Vanessa called/ all the way from Toronto/ She said that I/ could count on her/ if ever I was/ down and out"), but even this poem is transformed by the title, "G-D Wants His Song." Far more eloquent and frequent are lines that examine life from the inside out: "The Heart beneath is teaching/ To the broken Heart above" and "If the sea were sand alone/ And the flowers made of stone." VERDICT: An excellent addition for all poetry collections. —Doris Lynch

The Flame, collection of poems, notes and drawings, offers us the happiness of finding all the genius of the Canadian.

Leonard Cohen was an artist of genius and a magnificent man. The Flame , a collection of poems, notes and drawings, is a considerable testimony that the wandering Canadian wrote until his last breath. What transpires from this book, and which is missing today, is its great honesty and courage.

At a time when one is lying, where one sacrifices with ease until one's most essential values, where one plays the conservation at all costs, Leonard Cohen shows us how much he has recovered in every day, and with what clairvoyance he will have been constantly observed, as a man and as an artist.

What to remember from this book: joy, flame

From these poems, short texts and drawings emerge an incredible energy and lucidity . Cohen sees the world, Cohen is the world, and he crosses it with his own sensitivity. It carries the concepts and all-comers, evokes memories of the island of Hydra as Kanye West sings the men s urtout women, placing an observer participating joyfully.

This is what must be remembered from this book: joy, flame. While his reading may seem trite, only reminding the void left Cohen, it is rather enjoyable. It is a call to freedom, a declaration of independence, and above all a marvel of writing. We find in Cohen's texts the joy of the one who was his idol, Federico García Lorca.

When reading, you think of Dr. pitfalls of poems of the latter, Gypsy Ballads and Poet in New York , this poetics of duende that sublime expression. As the pages unfold, and this is where the book becomes sublime, we also discover a field commander Cohen who capitulates to death with this elegance that belongs only to him.
The words come together and the hour approaches, the pages turn faster and faster, his head is high under the hat he loved to wear on the end, and his heart huge. The look he puts on himself, on others, is very sweet. Ready, because he has no choice, Cohen signs with us, throughout The Flame , the famous Treaty that concludes the last song of his magnificent last album. We miss him every day.

Leonard Cohen Found His Inner Picasso In His Final Work
by Yevgeniya Traps, October 19, 2018

So little to say / So urgent / to say it, is the whole of one poem by the late Leonard Cohen. The poem is called “My Career.” Like so much of Cohen’s work, the poem reifies a certain kind of humbleness — before the divine, the beautiful, the mystical. But the modesty may be a put-on, for in another poem, called “Kanye West Is Not Picasso,” the speaker asserts, with a fair amount of facetiousness, to be sure, that, while Kanye is no Picasso, “I am Picasso.” (In later lines, the speaker also claims, “I am the Kanye West of Kanye West,” and “I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is / When he shoves your ass off the stage / I am the real Kanye West.”)
“My Career” also puts front-and-center — indeed, it’s all front-and-center, only front-and-center — the mortal necessities Cohen heeded throughout his long and prolific career, the sense that time is ever, always, running out, that what little remains must be given shape and significance.

Mortality and its attendant urgencies are especially present in “The Flame,” the collection of poems, notebook jottings, lyrics and dashed-off but meticulous drawings that is Cohen’s last, as he knew it would be. “I am trying to finish / My shabby career / With a little truth / In the now and here,” he writes in “If I Took a Pill.” Of course Cohen’s career was far from shabby. In a New Yorker magazine profile, published not long before the artist’s death, on November 7, 2016 (the day, it has been noted in meaningful tones, before the election of Donald Trump to the presidency), David Remnick documented the respect Cohen commanded among fellow musicians; even Bob Dylan — cryptic, grudging Bob Dylan — spoke plainly about his admiration.

Cohen was a rare thing: the musician’s musician whose work resonated with civilians, an artist who spoke simply, clearly, who said no more than what needed to be said, but who also said no less. His work was a mirror held up to the self, but one that reflected more than the self. He could be a little cheesy, a little passé, but that only added to his considerable charm. He could be repetitive, but that was only because the things he was interested in, the things he wanted to describe, were worth returning to again and again. And again.

Cohen was 82 when he died, which is not, in the grand scheme of things, a tragedy. And yet how bereft one feels in browsing through “The Flame.” Sincerity is not a quality I generally set a lot of store by — at least not aesthetically — but Cohen wears his well. He is doing what he can, he is doing what he must, he is doing what he cannot not do. In his foreword to the collection, Cohen’s son Adam Cohen notes that his father, “before he was anything else, was a poet. He regarded this vocation… as his ‘mandate from G-d to enter the dark.” (The reverence suggested by that hyphen, Adam Cohen writes, points to the artist’s “reluctance to write out the divine name even in English… an old Jewish custom and… evidence of the fidelity he mixed with his freedom.”)

Writing, more than “religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money,” offered a chance at salvation, a succor, a way to see beyond. This from a man who could be devout (his paternal grandfather, Lyor Cohen, was the founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress); who spent years living with monks; who knew many a woman and took many a drug; who toured incessantly; who knew worldwide admiration, earned (and lost and earned again) a fortune.

Onstage and offstage, Cohen’s words resonated — go on resonating — and if they saved him, they saved others, too. “There’s a crack in everything,” insists the chorus of “Anthem.” “That’s how the light gets in.” “Blackening pages,” Cohen called the act of writing. But the way he did it, he could have called it “lightening pages,” too. Yes, it is trite to say that a song, a poem, saved someone. But couldn’t it?

On Cohen’s last album, “You Want It Darker,” the titular song expresses a willingness to “kill the flame.” But “The Flame” suggests that he wasn’t, even at the end — especially at the end — so willing. The poems get longer; they digress, spiral out, spill across. Cohen returns to his themes, re-engages obsessions that never got old, reworks his arguments: The flame destroys but also illuminates, and perhaps one is not possible without the other. There’s a crack in everything. It lets the light in. “Hineni / I’m ready, my Lord,” Cohen intones during the refrain and the conclusion of “You Want It Darker.” Here I am, Cohen says, and there he was, ready to grapple with what had come and what would.

LEONARD COHEN
The old law
Shortly before his death, the singer finished the work on his last book. Now it appears in German
Updated on 26.10.2018, 15:38 - by Maria Ossowski

Here you read a book review, dear reader, and it begins with prohibitions. Just obey!

1.) Stay away from the book if you do not care about Judaism, meaning questions about life and death and contradictions in these topics. Cohen's poetry touches on the basic questions of existence. And Cohen liked to argue well and knowledgeably with the ancient scriptures.

2.) Never put the flame by Leonard Cohen in the bookcase on the shelf »Popliteratur«. Rather to Heine, Rilke, Goethe. Or the Shakespeare sonnets. Already at Hesse I would be careful.

3.) Never read Cohen's poetry and notes on the train. Otherwise you forget your goal.

4.) Never read the book online or as an e-book. His beauty needs paper.

5.) Never buy only one copy. Have the bookseller wrap three more for your most important people in wrapping paper.

POEMS Leonard Cohen was a Jew, poet, lover, seeker, draftsman, musician. And in exactly this order; his roles were interwoven and complemented each other. "My father was a poet even more than anything else," is what Adam Cohen says in the very personal foreword to the book. "He understood that as his mission to Gd. The indent is an old Jewish tradition and further proof of his firm belief, which he combined with his own freedom. «

Cohen himself selected 63 poems for the book, which had already been severely weakened, which he had often worked on for decades and which he did not want to publish until the end of his life. They form the first part of the book. In the second one we read the poems from his last four albums. The third part is dedicated to his notes, which often contain ideas for his poetic work or songs. Everything can be read in English and congenially translated into German by outstanding lyricists and authors.

Cohen has always written, at any time, at any occasion. When his son asked him for sweets money, Leonard told the boy to rummage through his pockets for bills or coins. Adam inevitably found there notebooks. Later, when he was looking for a lighter or a match with his father, Adam rummaged in drawers full of notebooks or notebooks. And when the son once asked his father if he had tequila, "he sent me to the fridge, where I found a frozen, lost notebook."

SPIRITUALLY Writing, the script, created the foundation of his life according to ancient Jewish tradition, Cohen once said in an interview. Whether notes, poems or thoughts, Jewish themes are repeatedly drawn through Cohen's spiritual world. Despite spiritual devotion to Zen Buddhism and borderline experiences with drugs, the Jewish heritage was the basis of his art.

In his notebook "9-17" it says: "What the old laws mean / why they make a difference / what is pure and what is impure / Meat in the flesh / Was given to you / So you can know / When you approach each other / I write this on the border / who insists that the full moon must be new / and the new moon must be full / I do not speak of sin / only of readiness and / hospitality & wisdom / moderation «.

The wisdom of moderation, the validity of the old laws, the modesty of God, all of this can be found in Cohen's work. Just like the opposite: "Born in the heart of the Bible & I know the pious inclination ...", he notes and immediately turns his own piety with Heine's self-irony: "I could turn paper wings to angels. I'm a fucking son of a bitch. "

BEAUTY Cohen notes could be arranged hardly in many small, inconspicuous stapling he has held for years turns his thoughts. And he has drawn a lot. These self-portraits in old age supplement his writings. The sharp features and wrinkles show transience, beauty and melancholy.

Cohen himself once said that he had grown up abruptly when the Shoah entered his consciousness. A kind of hat surrounds his bald head in a 2004 portrait. "Seas of blood" is written on it. Under the chin of the collar: "oceans of regret". Not cruel enough, we read in the middle, not even remotely, is the world circumscribed with this image.

The metaphor of the flames permeates Leonard Cohen's entire work, she also gives his estate the title. "Word of the words / And means of all means / Hallowed be your name / Thy name be praised / He stands on my heart / In burning letters."

ESSENCE Burning letters, eating flames. New arises. Cohen's estate is the essence of a life for art, for Judaism, for God. With a first edition of 20,000 copies, the publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch shows the importance it attaches to this gem of book art.

The online question from a reader in the Amazon commentary column proves what Cohen fans have been upset about anyway: "Why did not this poet ever receive the Nobel Prize for Literature?"

The Flame, Leonard Cohen
For those of us who feel the absence of Leonard Cohen more markedly every day since his death on November 7, 2016 (the day after Donald Trump won the presidential election), The Flame is a gift. It is a collection of Cohen’s last poems, illustrations, unfinished drafts, the revelatory acceptance speech he gave when he won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2011, and his very last text, sent less than 24 hours before he died. In terms of quality, these poems and lyrics are as startling and stirring, as clever, funny and sorrowful as we came to expect from a poet/singer/songwriter who watched over the cultural landscape of the last half century like a one man Mount Rushmore (one with added chutzpah and a truckload of good jokes). ‘I’ve grown old in a hundred ways. But my heart is young and still it plays’ he writes. This treasure trove is testament to that. Amen.

Poetry Review: Leonard Cohen’s “The Flame” — The Errant Canadian Comes Home
NOVEMBER 20, 2018
Leonard Cohen reinforces this dedication to lyricism with striking humility in his final book.
By Robert Israel